VALIDATING THE BIG BANG THEORY
HOLMDEL, NJ

click on any photo to
ENLARGE

November 20, 2009. While shortwave listening
one afternoon, I heard Stu AB2EZ mention that he was on a first name basis with
two Nobel Prize winners who made history at Crawford Hill. It struck me
that even though I live just 6 miles from the site, I never visited the place,
so that was the basis for this trip.

Being a National Historic Landmark, one would expect
to see road signs in the area but there were none. The location was found
via a Google map and the road leading to the site was also unmarked, in fact,
there is no indication of the site until you get to the top of the hill and
actually see it. There
is a Lucent (former AT&T) building next to the site which may be the reason for the stealth
location?

The 20 foot horn was very well constructed by the
Bell Telephone Laboratories and it
shows what can be done with proper R&D funding.

The horn was moved by serious motorized equipment.
The received signal was focused inside the "house" where the receiver and cooling equipment
was located. The receiver front end was cooled to reduce the noise floor
for critical measurements.

Behind the giant horn structure is a white building that must have
contained the "read out" instrumentation based on the large conduits that run into the
building from the horn.

The small white building in the foreground at right was
the lubricant shed.

HISTORY

The supersensitive horn antenna system was built by
Arthur B. Crawford of AT&T Bell
Laboratories for Project Echo. The idea was to put a metalized reflecting balloon in
space and test the feasibility of bouncing microwave telephone signals off the
balloon. If this theory worked, then microwave satellites could be built
and put in stationary orbit for reliable long distance communications. The
project proved successful and the horn system was no longer needed by the
laboratories.

Astronomers Arno A. Penzias and Robert W.
Wilson of Bell Laboratories asked and received permission to use the horn
antenna system for radio astronomy studies. While researching, Robert Wilson and Arno
Penzias discovered a low-level noise signal that was heard in every direction of the
sky and couldn't be eliminated. They thought that perhaps weather deterioration or bird
droppings on the horn were causing the problem, so they had all parts of the
horn system cleaned. While making precise measurements, the noise still
persisted at an unexplained level of 3.5 degrees Kelvin. What these two gentlemen accidently discovered was Cosmic
Microwave Background Radiation which was considered the best evidence for the
Big Bang Theory. Their discovery was verified by researchers at Princeton
University who were working on cosmic background radiation. In 1978 Bob Wilson and Arno Penzias received the Nobel
Prize for their discovery.